Tonight my daughters and I (and Ben) went to see the Stardust Circus which is enjoying a brief tour of our region. My older two daughters insisted that the fact this was the first time they had been to a circus represented unfinished business from their childhood. I can barely remember the first circus that I ever went to. I’m pretty sure that I was well under ten years of age. A child and an adult look at something like a circus with different eyes. Thinking about those two views of the same thing provides some insight into the Lord Jesus injunction to accept the kingdom with a childlike faith.
To a child a circus seems huge. People are all over the place. Act after act passes by. The costumes are beautiful. The performers all seem amazing with their skills and talents. The child performers seem to live in a world of wonder. Travelling all over Australia sounds such a romantic life. The animals add an exotic touch. Even the roar of lions brings that a sense of danger, even from behind the security of a wired enclosure.
To an adult different considerations come to mind. The big top does not really seem so big, in much the same way that your junior primar school seems smaller when you return to visit it years later. The people you passed selling the tickets and staffing the concessions are the people who are now dressed in the performer’s costumes. You appreciate the hard work that the practiced ease of the various routines and the transitions between them represent. The tumblers will emerge later among the acrobats, the aerialists will return for the trapeze. Many share the same surnames. It is a modest family business. The children must be home-schooled or distance educated. No-one who has travelled much really loves being on the road all the time. Get your photo taken at intermission and they are printed and ready for collection at the end of the show.
So, what is it to look to the kingdom of God with the eyes of a child? Well I try to remember that there is a lot of difference between a child-like faith and a childish faith.
A child-like faith speaks of simple acceptance. It allows space for wonder. When I grew up the way the content of Scripture was communicated to me touched me in a this way. David slaying a giant. Gideon and his fleece. Ruth and her faithful love.
Worshipping with God’s people had a similar place for reverence that impacted a child’s simple nature. The words: ‘Let us worship God’ calling us together, singing, the reading of the Scripture, the prayers (which did seem to go on) and the sermons (which similarly left one waiting at times for the phrase ‘and finally’) all lent themselves to cultivating a sense of something large taking place. Particularly when one could see adults, many admired and loved, deeply involved in these expressions of worship.
Somewhere though contemporary wisdom seems to have adjusted the paradigm. The thought is advanced that for worship to be meaningful it has to carried out at a level that young people can personally relate to. Functionally I think it means that the current expression of worship in some places takes its cues more from Hi-5 than the Scriptures. It is profoundly childish, not childlike. Amazingly, instead of simplicity services are now extraordinarily complex, with a cast of many and an array of technological support. One would wonder if many modern churches would find themselves able to conduct a service in a power blackout. Worship is diminished for that. We are diminished by being nourished by such worship.
I was talking to some colleagues the other day about why so many in our churches are casual in their attendance at worship. Generally the responses to this situation can be identified in two areas: make worship more appealing to them, in order to encourage attendance; or, secondly, point out the benefits that worshipping together before God brings to all who participate and how being absent brings a denial of those benefits. Worship must never be boring and should always engage, and there are great benefits to gathering together to encourage one another as the day draws near. But to encourage corporate worship on these two grounds is to encourage childish self-centeredness and not child-likeness.
Much modern worship takes its cues from the revival services of the 19th century. These in themselves came to be more and more designed to evoke emotional responses. They were cultivated to serve a particular context. To use a model designed basically to evoke particular human responses as a model for corporate worship has trained generations to focus on their own responses to stimuli as the criterea for success and not to judge the success of worship as a faithful use of the means that God tells us to employ as we worship Him.
The ultimate and only reason that we gather together for worship is obedience. God commands it. As we gather for worship we follow a Scriptural pattern of God’s people gathering before Him. If we do not come we disobey Him. Questions such as whether the worship reflects our preferences, or what emotional responses we experience are not the primary issues. The primary issue is always: are we obeying God? This is child-like. Child-likeness accepts and obeys.
I am always nervous about cost-justifying obedience to God. We should always be willing to learn of the blessings we experience as we obey, just as we should be willing to lament blessings foregone when we disobey. But we do not obey in order to get a blessing or to avoid an unwanted consequence. We obey because we are told to.
Many times as children we did not know the workings of those things we encountered. When we visited a circus we were unaware of all the workings, but we went and we enjoyed.
Even now as adults God commands us to do certain things. Obeying is not legalism. It is obedience. It is not for us to justify with sophistication why it is a good thing for us to obey and to be able to explain in grave terms the consequences of transgression.
It is for us to know that our God commands it. So we do it. With the wonder and simple faith of a child.
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